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California became the first state to legally abolish cash bail — for about five months. How the industry funded its own reversal, and the unlikely coalition that finished the job two years later
On August 28, 2018, Governor Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 10, eliminating cash bail statewide and replacing it with court-administered risk assessments — making California the first state in the nation to abolish commercial bail by statute. The bill had passed the Assembly 42–31 and the Senate 26–12, with the overwhelming majority of legislative Democrats in support. For a brief window, California had a real, signed, enacted law ending the industry this series has spent two posts documenting.
That window did not stay open long, though the precise mechanism by which it closed is worth getting exactly right rather than repeating the more dramatic, less accurate version that circulates informally. The bail industry did not undo SB 10 overnight. It used a constitutional process that simply takes time to complete — and the speed with which it completed that process is itself the finding worth documenting.
Roughly five months passed between Brown's signature and the law's formal suspension — not the "next day" some accounts imply, but still an unusually fast and unusually well-resourced reversal for legislation that had taken California lawmakers years to negotiate and pass. The speed came from money, organization, and a single industry with an existential stake moving in lockstep from the moment the governor's pen left the paper.
The conversion this post documents is the transformation of a signed statute into a contested ballot question — a legal mechanism available to any organized interest with enough money and motivation, used here by an industry whose entire commercial existence the new law would have ended. California Bail Agents Association lobbyist David Quintana stated the calculation without euphemism: "You don't eliminate an industry and expect those people to go down quietly." That is not a critic's characterization of the industry's motive. It is the industry's own lobbyist describing it.
The referendum mechanism converted what had been a legislative defeat into a political campaign the industry was well-positioned to win, for a structural reason worth naming plainly: a referendum requires defeating a "yes" vote to uphold reform, which means industry opponents needed only to create enough doubt or confusion to drive a "no," while reform advocates needed to build an affirmative coalition large enough to actively pass something. Sowing doubt is, in nearly every ballot context, the easier task.
The cleanest version of this story — industry money defeats reform — is also an incomplete one, and the Wall standard requires the more complicated truth be told instead. By the time Proposition 25 actually reached voters in November 2020, the coalition opposing it was not simply the bail industry and its allies. It included some of the same civil rights and criminal justice reform organizations that had originally championed ending cash bail altogether.
SB 10 in its final, amended form was not the bill its original civil rights coalition had first supported. Earlier drafts would have mandated pretrial release for most nonviolent charges and established independent pretrial service agencies. The version Brown actually signed instead gave judges and newly created pretrial assessment agencies significant discretion to detain people based on algorithmic risk-assessment scores — and those scores, multiple studies and advocacy groups argued, would simply launder the same racial disparities already present in arrest and booking data into a new, ostensibly neutral technical system.
This produced a genuinely unusual coalition against Proposition 25 by 2020: the ACLU of Northern California formally revoked its earlier support for SB 10. Human Rights Watch opposed the referendum. The NAACP's California State Conference opposed it. None of these organizations were arguing to preserve cash bail — they explicitly opposed the current system too — but they concluded that SB 10's algorithmic replacement risked producing equal or greater racial disparity through a more technocratic, harder-to-contest mechanism.
The honest structural finding is this: SB 10 was defeated by two coalitions with opposite goals voting the same way for entirely different reasons. The bail industry wanted to preserve commercial bail. A meaningful slice of the civil rights coalition wanted to prevent what they saw as a worse system from replacing it. Both got the same outcome — cash bail remained in place — though only one of those two coalitions actually wanted that result.
The Public Policy Institute of California's own pre-election analysis estimated SB 10 would have subjected roughly 311,000 people annually to a risk assessment, with about 142,500 people held on misdemeanors likely released within 12 hours rather than up to two days under the existing system — a real, measurable reduction in detention time for a substantial population, regardless of how the broader political fight resolved.
The same PPIC analysis found the risk-assessment system would not have addressed underlying racial disparity in who gets arrested and booked in the first place: 49 percent of booked African Americans would have been held for risk assessment under SB 10's criteria, compared to 37 percent of white and Latino arrestees and 36 percent of Asian American arrestees — disparities inherited directly from existing policing patterns rather than introduced by the new law, but also not corrected by it. This is the specific data point that the civil-rights wing of the opposition coalition pointed to directly.
A pending California Supreme Court case, In re Humphrey, loomed over the entire 2020 vote — a case directly questioning cash bail's constitutionality under existing law, independent of whatever voters decided on Proposition 25. The referendum's outcome did not resolve that separate legal question, meaning California's bail system remained legally contested on a second track regardless of how the ballot measure landed.
"You don't eliminate an industry and expect those people to go down quietly."
— David Quintana, California Bail Agents Association lobbyistProposition 25 failed in November 2020. SB 10 never took effect. Commercial cash bail remains the law in California today, alongside every other state but Illinois, which abolished it through different legislative means in 2023. The industry's referendum strategy worked exactly as designed — not by winning an argument about whether commercial bail itself was good policy, but by converting a settled legislative outcome into a new, fundable political contest, and by benefiting, whether by design or coincidence, from a second coalition that opposed the specific replacement on entirely separate grounds.
SB 10's August 28, 2018 signing, its legislative passage margins, and the referendum's procedural timeline (90-day signature window, 365,880 threshold, January 16, 2019 certification of approximately 409,505 valid signatures) are corroborated consistently across Ballotpedia's two referendum entries and a published University of the Pacific law review article on the measure, three independent sources in close agreement; this post explicitly corrects an earlier, less precise characterization of the suspension timeline as near-instantaneous, in keeping with the Wall's standard of disclosing and correcting imprecision directly. The top-ten-donor composition is drawn directly from Ballotpedia's referendum entry, which itself cites contemporaneous campaign finance reporting. David Quintana's quotation is drawn from Ballotpedia, corroborated by its appearance in connection with contemporaneous reporting on the referendum's funding. The ACLU of Northern California's reversal, and Human Rights Watch's and the NAACP's opposition to Proposition 25, are corroborated across New America's published analysis and The Appeal's contemporaneous reporting, both citing named individuals and organizational statements directly. The PPIC risk-assessment impact figures (311,000 annual assessments, 142,500 misdemeanor releases, the 49%/37%/36% racial breakdown) are drawn directly from the Public Policy Institute of California's own published analysis, a Tier 1 nonpartisan research source. The pending In re Humphrey case is corroborated across the Brennan Center and SPUR's voter guide.
This post deliberately resists the simpler narrative in which the bail industry alone defeated reform. The fuller record shows a more structurally interesting outcome: an industry-funded referendum mechanism succeeded in part because it was never tested against a fully unified opposition, and the reasons the opposition fractured are themselves a legitimate part of this case's evidentiary record.
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